In English, to cook is to prepare food, especially by applying heat, but there's no assumption of a particular means of applying heat. Boiling and roasting are both varieties of cooking (in both senses). So are zapping in a microwave, searing on a griddle-pan, grilling under an electric overhead grill, etc.
I think you could say the following: "When you make meringues, they don't really cook in the oven, it's more that they slowly dry out". So maybe "cook" means not merely "to prepare food by applying heat" but something more like "to prepare food by applying sufficient heat to denature proteins", the underlying idea presumably being something like "to heat food up enough to make it safe to eat".
Of course I'm using "'cook' means not merely X but Y" as shorthand for something like "a lot of skilled native English speakers, when they use or hear the word "cook", are thinking about Y as well as X". So what I really mean is that when I use or hear the word "cook" the following ideas are all somewhat active in my brain:
but for me there's no very strong activation of, e.g.,
I dare say that if I attempted to draw a stereotypical instance of "cooking" it would be quite likely to involve stirring a pot or pan, but it would be quite likely to involve someone wearing a chef's hat and apron too and those obviously aren't part of the meaning of "cooking".
I looked a bit into the etymology. It is not helpful. Cook as a noun or to cook means the same thing all the way down to Latin coquus and to PIE *pekʷ-, with only the later having one more meaning: to ripen. Heat application is there all the way, but not really specifying how. I would suggest that probably people boiled or simmered more than they roasted in historical times, because, well, convection, that makes even hardest meat sooner or later soft without burning it, and does not waste nutrients into the grease falling into the fire. For example, i...
This is an extension of a comment I made that I can't find and also a request for examples. It seems plausible that, when giving advice, many people optimize for deepness or punchiness of the advice rather than for actual practical value. There may be good reasons to do this - e.g. advice that sounds deep or punchy might be more likely to be listened to - but as a corollary, there could be valuable advice that people generally don't give because it doesn't sound deep or punchy. Let's call this boring advice.
An example that's been discussed on LW several times is "make checklists." Checklists are great. We should totally make checklists. But "make checklists" is not a deep or punchy thing to say. Other examples include "google things" and "exercise."
I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of boring advice. If you can, provide evidence and/or a plausible argument that your boring advice actually is useful, but I would prefer that you err on the side of boring but not necessarily useful in the name of more thoroughly searching a plausibly under-searched part of advicespace.
Upvotes on advice posted in this thread should be based on your estimate of the usefulness of the advice; in particular, please do not vote up advice just because it sounds deep or punchy.